AAU staff development

Pedagogical courses

Introduction

Pedagogical activities for academic staff in Engineering and Science

The Aalborg PBL model is famous around the world for its innovative curriculum. In particular in training future engineers the model has been highly successful as evidenced in a series of publications in Ingeniøren. Students who come to Aalborg University have high expectations of the education they will be receiving. The challenge for teaching staff in this innovative pedagogical system is to continue to provide a learning environment that focuses on stimulating students’ active participation in the learning process, rather than an environment that simply disseminates knowledge. This means that academic staff needs to fulfil several roles, including the facilitation of the group process, designing and initiating of learning activities as well as the coordination of program units. This comes on top of more traditional teacher tasks, like instruction and assessment of learning outcomes.

Teaching engineering and science at University level requires high quality disciplinary expertise based on sound professional practice and scientific research as well as pedagogical competencies to cover the various teaching tasks. In order to support academic staff at the Faculty for Engineering and Science in maintaining and updating their teaching competencies, the Learning Lab and the Aalborg Centre jointly prepared a catalogue offering a variety of pedagogical activities.

The catalogue contains four different types of activities:

Short courses and workshops

Special seminars run by international experts

Writing, publishing and collaborating at international conferences and through networks

Single subject courses for relevant Master degrees

Experts with experience in research on teaching and learning and with teaching practice in engineering and science will be in charge of the activities. All participants will be issued with a certificate of participation, building towards their teaching portfolio.

In addition to the catalogue tailor made activities can be organised on request for departments, schools, study boards to suit specific educational programmes. Consultancy will be offered on request to support the development and implementation of new teaching strategies in a programme.

Master in Problem Based Learning in Engineering and Science

The Master in Problem Based Learning is a fully online, highly interactive and flexible e-Learning programme for faculty staff at institutions which want to change to Problem Based Learning (PBL) – or for faculty staff who just are interested in learning more about PBL.